The advent of the Internet in recent years has resulted in exponentially increased use of this interactive media as a powerful advertising tool. Interactive advertising provides opportunities for advertisers to target their ads to receptive audiences. Such targeted ads are more likely to be useful to end users since the ads may be relevant to a need inferred from a user's activity. For example, the ads may be chosen based on the user's search query or on a content of a document that the user requested.
So-called contextual advertising is advertising that it targeted to a specific content of media broadcast. A contextual advertising system scans the content for relevant information and returns ads based on such relevant information. One example of such system is a system that scans a text of a website for keywords and returns ads to the webpage based on the information that a user of the webpage is viewing. For example, if the user is viewing a webpage directed to travel destinations, the system will scan this content and display the ads relevant to travel, such as ads for airline tickets or hotels. Contextual advertising is also used by Internet search engines to display advertisings on “search result” pages that are relevant to words searched for by users of the search engines. For example, if some user types the search word “mortgage” into the search engine, the ads that are returned will be the ads that are reasonably expected to include the word “mortgage,” such as ads for banks or other lending institutions.
Ad serving is a technology that places advertisements on web pages. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns. An ad server is a computer server, specifically a web server, that stores advertisements used in online marketing and delivers them to website visitors. The content of the web server is constantly updated so that the website or webpage on which the ads are displayed contains new advertisements—e.g., banners (static images/animations) or text—when the site or page is visited or refreshed by a user.
Ad serving systems are known in the art. One of such systems is described in U.S. Patent Application No. 2004/0059708—to Dean et al., which is incorporated herein by reference. The ad serving system disclosed in Dean et al. obtains broadcast content from a requester, determines ads relevant to content and transmits relevant ads back to requester to be inserted into the broadcast.
Other ad serving systems search various audio or video files based on metadata associated with those files. Metadata refers to a descriptive searchable data hand entered to describe contents of an audio or video file. Thus, the results obtained from such search engines are limited to metadata information stored in a data repository. Such metadata information that describes an audio or video content is usually limited to information provided by the publisher of the content and consists of a brief summary of the content. If this limited information does not match the search query, the search engine will fail to associate relevant information with associated audio or video file even if the actual content of the file contain this information. An example of such system is disclosed in U.S. Patent Application No. 2007/0118873 A1 to Houh et al., which provides a method and system for generating and presenting search text snippets that enable user-directed navigation of the underlying audio-video content. The method involves obtaining metadata associated with discrete media content that satisfies a search query and creating a search “snippet” that enables a user to arbitrarily select and commence playback of the underlying media content at any of the individual content segments.
Yet another type of ad serving system is a system that searches video files based on some type of predetermined criteria and retrieves the portions of video files containing such criteria. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,741,655 to Chang et al. discloses a system and method for permitting a user to locate one or more video objects from a video clip over an interactive network. The system searches videos frames and retrieves specific pieces of video information which meet arbitrary predetermined criteria, such as shape or motion characteristics, of video objects embedded within the stored video information in response to a user-defined query.
However, the ad serving systems discussed above have several disadvantages. For example, such systems usually require a requester, such as a user or a search engine, to provide search words. The ad server system then uses the inputted words as keywords to determine relevant advertisings. Or a set of predetermined criteria must be provided to enable the ad serving system to match the video content with a relevant advertising.
Some of these problems were obviated by providing systems that incorporate voice recognition techniques to extract portions of underlying text from various video or audio files and then use this text to identify relevant ads to be displayed to an end-user. Such systems are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Patent Application No. 2007/0078708 A1 to Yu et al., U.S. Patent Application No. 2004/0143844 A1 to Brant et al., and WO 01/50296 A2 to Kopra et al. However, while some of these more recent systems do have advantages over older systems that did not use voice recognition techniques, they still suffer from many of the same disadvantages, as well as others.
What is desired, therefore, is to provide an improved system and method for providing contextually relevant advertisements to be served with any video or audio streams. It is further desired to provide a system and method that enables various audio or video websites to monetize their video content.